Reconstructing Vanished Rome, The Invisible Legacy of Roman Engineering

“ THE Romans were noted for many things, but for nothing do they better deserve fame than for the system of roads which connected every part, even the remotest province of the empire, with Italy and the capital During the golden days every road literally led to Rome, for outside the limits of the Roman world there were no roads worthy of the name, and within its limits every highway was but a part of the system which had its center in the Appian Forum. ”

“ CHAPTER II THE APPIAN WAY
It was the proud boast of the ancient Romans that all roads led to their city. Rome was the centre and mistress of the world; and as the loneliest rill that rises in the bosom of the far-off mountain leads, if followed, to the ocean, so every path in the remotest corner of the vast empire conducted to the great gilded column in the Roman Forum, upon which all distances without the walls were marked. To the Romans the world is indebted for opening up communications with different countries. They were the great engineers and road-makers of antiquity. ”

“ On the other hand, in the Grecian temple shines the purest product of mind, perfect in symmetry, chaste in ornament, and resplendent with all the attractions of immortal youth. The best and only satisfactory works of the Romans are those we usually classify under the head of engineering; such as roads, bridges, aqueducts, and fortifications, and these are projected on a scale, and executed with a solidity, worthy of the greatness of their empire. But in architecture properly so called, nothing of their creation is to be admired but the colossal mass, and its constructive extravagance. ”

“ The Romans soon found it necessary to utilise their central position by rendering themselves accessible to the rest of Italy, and they commenced building those marvellous roads, which in most cases have remained, owing to their solid construction. "Building" is the proper word to use, for a Roman road is really a broad wall built in a deep ditch so as to come up above the level of the surface. Scarcely any amount of traffic could wear this solid substructure away, and to this day throughout Europe traces can be found of the Roman roads built nearly two thousand years ago. ”

“ The first and greatest of the Italian roads was the famous Appian Way (Via Appia, called Regina Viarum, “Queen of Roads”) , which was begun by Appius Claudius, Censor in 312 B. C. The struggle with the Samnites was at its height when this great causeway, built with large, square stones on a raised platform, was made direct from the gates of Rome to Capua, in Campania. The Via Appia was afterwards extended, through Samnium and Apulia, to Brundusium (on the lower Adriatic) , the port of embarkment for Greece. ”

“ So Belisarius led his army from Naples by the Latin Way, leaving on the left the Appian Way, which Appius, the consul of the Romans, had made nine hundred years before [66] and to which he had given his name.
Now the Appian Way is in length a journey of five days for an unencumbered traveller; for it extends from Rome to Capua. And the breadth of this road is such that two waggons going in opposite directions [145] can pass one another, and it is one of the noteworthy sights of the world. ”

“ The National Road served its purpose grandly, was a complete success, the pride and glory of its day and generation, and when it lost its place as a national thoroughfare, the government that made it was all the stronger because it had been made. The average width of the Appian Way was from eighteen to twenty feet, so as to admit of two carriages passing each other, and the expense of constructing the first section of it was so great that it exhausted the public treasury of Rome. ”

“ You can never argue from the absence of traces to-day that a Roman road did not exist, for it is astonishing how thoroughly time eliminates such things. There are whole great towns like Aquilea and Hippo of which not even the foundations remain to-day. Even in England, where Roman survival is most marked, two towns, Silchester and Uriconium, have gone save for a few ruins; and there are great stretches of Roman road in every country of Western Europe which have mysteriously and wholly disappeared without leaving a trace of the tremendous work undertaken to build them ”

“ Rome had become depopulated; men ceased to repair the ruins left by fire and sword; the edifices which by their very immensity had become useless were utterly neglected, allowed to crumble and fall. And then, too, the new religion everywhere hunted down the old one, stole its temples, overturned its gods. Earthly deposits probably completed the disaster—there were, it is said, both earthquakes and inundations—and the soil was ever rising, the alluvia of the young Christian world buried the ancient pagan society. ”

“ As it would always be more easy to carry away the materials of a Roman road than dig for them in a quarry, it has happened that those materials have been in general so intirely removed, as to leave almost no where any other trace, than history and tradition, of their existence. ”

“ Its vestiges are found on an eminence sloping to the south-west, and surrounded by marshes. In vain, however, does the traveller look for the walls of the city, for the citadel, for the dykes constructed to defend from inundation the temples, buildings, and the monuments of its grandeur. The barbarians from the North, the Romans, and the succession of ages, have destroyed even the ruins. The once powerful city of Pella is now sunk down into fragments of tombs, masses of brick and tile, and about threescore huts, inhabited by Bulgarians, with a tower garrisoned by about a dozen Albanians. ”

“ If we consider the present city as at all connected with the famous one of old, it is only because we find it built over its grave. A depth of thirty feet of soil has covered up the Rome of ancient days, so that it lies like the dead corpse of a giant, decaying for centuries, with no survivor mighty enough even to bury it, until the dust of all those years has gathered slowly over its recumbent form and made a casual sepulchre. ”

“ On what does human greatness hang! These ruins of ancient splendour surpass the ruins of Rome and Greece by their magnificence, and can be compared only with the ruins of Egypt. Unfortunately, these vestiges of vanished civilisation are destroyed, little by little, by frequent earthquakes, and still more by the inhabitants who continue to pull them unmercifully to pieces for their new buildings. In one of the streets of Samarkand a house was pointed out to my husband whose whole front had been taken from the ruins of one of the most beautiful minarets of the town. ”

“ Plentiful evidence shows that even in Italy and even in towns where men have dwelt without a break since Roman days, the Roman streets, and with them the Roman town-plans, have far oftener vanished than endured. Rome herself, the Eternal City, uses hardly one street to-day which was used in the Roman Empire. Some few Italian towns, described in detail above, have a better claim to be called 'eternal'; half a dozen in northern Italy retain their ancient streets in singular perfection. ”

“ Rome has no right to its name; at most, it should be called New Rome. Not one single street here goes in the same direction as the old one; it is an entirely foreign vegetation that has grown up on a part of the old soil, as insignificant and thoroughly modern in its style as possible, without nationality, without history. It is very characteristic that the really ancient and the modern city lie almost side by side. ”

“ There is not a great deal of Ancient Rome left––the old buildings appear to have been knocked down, levelled up, and new and mean streets built over the top. In the dark ages they seem to have had no regard to the grandeur of Ancient Rome, they buried up the massive columns and statuary, and built up the present New Rome over them, so that many of the places laid bare are ten or twelve feet below the present street level, especially in the neighbourhood of the Forum of Trajan and the Pantheon, and whenever they are re-building in this part of the city they come across some old relic or other. ”

“ There are, of course, countless other short lengths of highway, coming down from historic times, left in Italy, but the Roman viae with which we have become familiar in the classical geographies and histories of our schooldays are now replaced by modern thoroughfares which, however, in many cases, follow, or frequently cut in on, the old itineraries. Of these old Roman Ways that most readily traced, and of the greatest possible interest to the automobilist who would do something a little different from what his fellows have done, is the Via Æmilia. ”

“ Although the main Roman roads are still in use, there are a great number of cross-roads, which for centuries have been out of use, and their exact courses can only be traced with difficulty, passing as they do through what are now quiet, secluded places, long overgrown by grass and underwood and cultivated fields.
Many Britons must in the course of time have adopted 17 Roman ways and Roman civilization; but the bulk of the Britons, living away from the Roman centres, kept to their own customs, and cultivated the ground in the way their ancestors had done. ”

“ Their continued existence compliments the Roman founders’ nice eye for a promising site, but makes large-scale investigation of Roman levels difficult or impossible, for residents of flourishing modern cities naturally resist resettlement in the interests of archaeology. Excavation in these populated113 areas must wait upon repair of war damage, urban improvements (as when laying new sewer mains reveals Roman ones that follow the grid of the Roman streets) , or new building to bring new facts to light. No colony has been completely excavated. ”

“ Peter’s. And—even worse, I am almost afraid to write it to you—we have a telephone!
A telephone in the Eternal City! In the beginning I was as much shocked by the idea as you can be. The first conversation over the wire consoled me. Ice-chests, electric cars, and telephones only bring home more strongly the feeling that life in Rome is modern, mediæval, and pagan, all at the same time; it is all here in strata, like the rubbish Signor Boni is excavating from the Roman Forum. ”

“ Thousands of years before the city of Rome was ringed with its six miles of stone wall, other peoples in Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa were building civilizations. New techniques of excavation, identification and preservation, subsidized by an increasingly affluent human society, and developed during the past two centuries of archeological research have provided the needed means and manpower. ”

“ Peter’s, as at so many other ancient sites, what the archaeologist digs up is not things but people. The remains in the niche under the Red Wall are not dry bones; they are live history. The breathing of life into that history is a major and largely unsung triumph of the modern science of archaeology, patiently at work over the last eighty years. To come to know a fragment of our past is to recognize a piece of ourselves. Perhaps, as archaeology interprets history, making the mute stones speak, we may come to know our past so well that we shall not be condemned to repeat it. ”

“ If other histories can grow old, it is indeed the more needful, exactly because it serves to educate new generations, to reanimate Roman history, incorporating in it the new facts constantly discovered by archaeological effort, infusing it with a larger and stronger philosophical spirit, carrying into it the matured experience of the world, which learns not only by studying but also by living. ”

“ Everyone remembers that Augustus left Rome a city of marble, but too few people recall that he found it a city of brick. The picture of Rome in most people’s minds is of a marble metropolis, proud mistress of a Mediterranean Empire. This to be sure she eventually became, but the archaeological evidence is that until the end of the third century B.C. Rome looked tawdry, with patched temples and winding, unpaved streets. To trace the development is fascinating, and archaeology is our chief guide. ”

“ Decidedly Rome was never more Roman than at present—the pulling down and building and excavating, the inappropriate jostlings of time and character merely add to the eternal quality, serene and ironical. Besides, these demolitions have disclosed many things hitherto hidden, and soon destroyed: here in Rione Monti, for instance, above the tram-lines, great green walls, boulders from Antiquity, and quiet convent gardens, with spaliered lemons, suddenly displayed above the illustrated hoardings of a street to be. ”

“ Archaeologists have not confined their interests to the great consular roads. Minor highways in areas away from the main stream of traffic are often more rewarding, since they tend to be better preserved, and offer some chance to trace the pre-Roman systems that underlie or intersect them. The district just north of Rome has been surveyed in this way by members of the British School at Rome since 1954, only just in time, for there prevails in this region a situation analogous to the rapid disappearance of Indian remains in the American West with the building of the great hydroelectric dams. ”

“ They were not considered satisfactory by scholars because the excavations had not gone deep enough, having been stopped by water, as very often happens in Rome at certain periods of the year, when the springs are high. They were again suspended by the same cause in the spring and summer of 1874, but Signor Rosa, with his usual energy, obtained machinery and a steam-engine to pump the water out [157] . The whole area was found to be undermined by chambers and passages, with walls chiefly of brick, but some of tufa, with indications of several different periods [158] . ”

“ Furthermore, some of the Esquiline tombs already mentioned, containing mid-fourth century artifacts, were outside the line of the Grotta Oscura wall, while some of the tombs containing archaic artifacts were inside. The Romans rarely buried their dead within a city wall: the inference is that at the date of the earlier tombs, Rome had no proper ring-wall, while by the date of the later (fourth-century) tombs a circuit wall had been built. ”

“ The reservoir project was now in danger of drifting into European politics, and it was wisely concluded in Cairo and London to let the matter drop for a few years from public notice.
"What is a useless temple," asked engineers, "in comparison with a work involving the welfare of millions of human beings?" "Are sordid commercial motives," replied archæologists, "to override everything artistic in the world, and is a priceless monument of antiquity to be lost to civilization that a few more fellaheen, already prosperous, may grow more cotton and sugar and grain?" ”

“ It establishes the liberal policy that any competent scientist who desires to place the material secured in a public museum will be authorized by the Department of the Interior to examine ruins, but that no person will be permitted to excavate them for the purpose of acquiring specimens for traffic or private gain, and that wilful destruction of historic and prehistoric landmarks must cease. The most zealous archæologist must admit that this leaves little to be desired. The main thing, a system of governmental protection for archæological remains, is an accomplished fact. ”